Webmaster Tools External Links Shows My IP Address

[webdude]

I was just perusing WebMaster tools for one of my sites and noticed that added on February 28th, it shows under "Pages with external links" the IP address for this site. I searched my entire site to make sure there are no links using an IP address - there are none, of course... all links have the full path (ie http://example.com/thispage.html). I have a <BASE href="http://example.com/"> on every page, including the home page. When you type the IP address in Google, sure enough, the home page pops up and it is the only result. I am concerned because according to WebMaster tools, Google thinks that the link coming in is from an external site. Of course, I am thinking of dupe content here. I am at my wits end trying to figure out how Google got the IP address in the first place. I can't find any reference online whatsoever to that IP address. Everything else appears as normal. Search results the same. site: query the same. Yada yada yada...

I am running IIS if any one knows how to do an IP to domain name redirect. Or any help would be greatly appreciated. I was going through some old posts here and it seems this does pop up in the forum once in a while. And most of the responses were to fix it immediately.

Thanks for any help!

[edited by: tedster at 4:57 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

This kind of thing can happen when some inept webmaster links to you using your ip address - I once had this happen with a link from a major newspaper! Ionly discovered the source through the server log referers - not through a link report from any search engine. Apparently Webmaster Tools got this crossed up in your case, however it happened that they found the ip address.

IIS can be a bear on various redirects, and I'm not sure of any fix that works natively in this case (hope someone has one!) You might check into a third party product for IIS called ISAPI Rewrite. The latest version makes it possible to use .htaccess syntax from Apache and import it as-is to an IIS server.